A service provider refers to an enterpriser who provides various kinds of material and nonmaterial goods and services. In recent years, particularly, service providers have run businesses through the Internet to provides diverse service goods, such as on-line games, multimedia contents, and community services, most of which were provided without a fee at an earlier period of spread of the Internet.
However, with the recent increase of recognition of economic value of Internet service goods in the marketplace, a charging system has been employed for the Internet service goods. Such a charging system may be generally divided into a flat sum system in which a user can freely use services provided by a service provider with periodic payment of a fixed amount of money, and an individual payment system in which a user pays a fee for individual service goods to be used.
The flat sum system is divided into a pre-payment system and a post-payment system according to a payment date in a period of use of a service.
The post-payment system is a system of paying a service use fee, for example, at the end of every month if service subscribers pay the service use fee monthly. However, in many cases, service subscribers secede from the service after having used the service provided by the service provider, which may result in great economical damage to the service provider. Accordingly, for the purpose of avoiding such damage, the service providers have introduced the pre-payment system of the flat sum system.
However, in the pre-payment system of the flat sum system, for example if the service subscriber pays the service use fee at the beginning of every month for a period of one month, when the subscriber applies for first payment at the end of a month and pays a fee corresponding to a period of time remaining in that month, there arises a problem similar to the post-payment system of the flat sum system. That is, if a subscriber with ill intentions enjoys all services provided to subscribers who select the flat sum system for a short time and then secedes from the service before the next payment date, the service provider suffers an economic loss while the subscriber enjoys the service far more cheaply than the normal fee.
On the other hand, a payment system in the flat sum system includes a system in which a subscriber applies for payment for every period of payment and a system in which payment is automatically performed for every period of update of payment from a payment update date immediately after a payment application date as long as a subscriber does not apply for annulment of service use.
However, in the former payment system, it is inconvenient for a subscriber who continues to use services provided by the service provider to repeat a payment application procedure for every period of payment, particularly in the case of a small amount of payment. For that reason, the latter automatic payment system has been more frequently used.
However, in the automatic payment system, if a payment acknowledgement error occurs on a payment update date due to an abnormality of the service use fee payment system, the service provider annuls service use of the subscriber irrespective of intention of the subscriber for the reason that the subscriber has not paid a service use fee for the corresponding period.
In this case, a problem arises in that a subscriber who completes a payment application procedure must apply for payment again without being aware of the cause of the annulment of service. Particularly, such a problem become serious when continuity of service is important, as in a case where a subscriber receives a benefit only when he continues to use the service for more than a prescribed time, or when a subscriber who does not use the service from a payment update date on which a payment acknowledgement error occurs becomes aware of annulment of his service use after a certain period of time elapses.